Thoughts, tips and tricks on business development for the creative industry

Tag Archives: tenders

One thing that I spend a lot of time doing is writing tender responses.

Tender documents come in a variety of forms and are usually written by procurement people who appear to have little or no creative flair. Procurement people talk their own language and have a dictionary of special jargon: RFP, PQQ, ITT, WTF? etc. Another favorite pastime is to throw seemingly irrelevant questions at you.

If you haven’t done a lot of tenders this can all be a bit daunting and it’s sometimes tempting to fight jargon with jargon or to just give up. My advice however is not to be put off but to approach tender responses with the same open-mindedness as you would any other brief.

Pity the poor procurement manager having to read through the dozens or even hundreds of responses. Make yours stand out. Take some time to understand their organisation, what they do and who they do it for. Perhaps even give them something to smile about.

Don’t fall into the trap of answering a tedious question with a tedious answer.

When you are struggling to write up a disaster recovery plan, a health and safety or data protection policy for a tender, it’s easy to forget that overall, the tender is a great opportunity to promote your company.

Like any new business activity, it’s in your best interests to do all that you can to differentiate yourself from the competition.